Stream 18 Hours of Free Guided Meditations

in Health, Psychology, Religion | July 27th, 2016

Meditate_Tapasya_Dhyana

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This year’s crazed elec­tion got you stressed out? Or just life in gen­er­al? “It’s nev­er too late,” Allen Gins­berg reminds us, “to med­i­tate.” On Mon­day, we brought you sev­er­al ver­sions of Ginsberg’s med­i­ta­tion instruc­tions, which he set to song and record­ed with Bob Dylan and dis­co maven/experimental cel­list Arthur Rus­sell, among oth­ers. Ginsberg’s “sug­ar-coat­ed dhar­ma,” as he called it, does a great job of draw­ing atten­tion to med­i­ta­tion and its ben­e­fits, per­son­al and glob­al, but it’s hard­ly the sooth­ing sound­track one needs to get in the right pos­ture and frame of mind.

For that, you might try Moby’s 4 hours of ambi­ent music, which he released free to the pub­lic through his web­site last month. Tra­di­tion­al­ly speak­ing, no music is nec­es­sary, but there’s also no need go the way of Zen monks, or to embrace any form of Bud­dhism or oth­er reli­gion. Whol­ly sec­u­lar forms of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion have been shown to reduce stress, depres­sion, and anx­i­ety, help man­age phys­i­cal pain, improve con­cen­tra­tion, and pro­mote a host of oth­er ben­e­fits.

Still skep­ti­cal? Don’t take my word for it. We’ve point­ed you toward the vast amount of sci­en­tif­ic research on the sub­ject of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, much of it con­duct­ed by skep­ti­cal researchers who came to believe in the ben­e­fits after see­ing the evi­dence. If you too have come around to the idea that, yes, you should prob­a­bly med­i­tate, your next thought may be, but how? Well, in addi­tion to Ginsberg’s wit­ty Vipas­sana how-to, UCLA has a series of short, guid­ed med­i­ta­tions avail­able on iTune­sU. And just above, we have an entire playlist of guid­ed meditations—18 hours in total. It was put togeth­er by Spo­ti­fy, whose free soft­ware you can down­load here.

These include more reli­gious­ly-ori­ent­ed kinds of med­i­ta­tions like “Guid­ed Chakra Bal­anc­ing” and the mys­ti­cal philoso­phies of Deep­ak Chopra, but don’t run off yet if all that’s too woo for you. There are also sev­er­al hours of very prac­ti­cal, non-reli­gious instruc­tion from teach­ers like Pro­fes­sor Mark Williams of the Oxford Mind­ful­ness Cen­tre, who offers med­i­ta­tions for cog­ni­tive ther­a­py. See Williams dis­cuss mind­ful­ness research and med­i­ta­tion as an effec­tive means of man­ag­ing depres­sion in the video above. (Catch a full mind­ful­ness lec­ture from Pro­fes­sor Williams and hear anoth­er guid­ed med­i­ta­tion from him on Youtube).

You’ll also find a 30-minute guid­ed med­i­ta­tion for sleep, sitar music from Ravi Shankar, and many oth­er guid­ed med­i­ta­tions at var­i­ous points on the spec­trum from the mys­ti­cal to the whol­ly prac­ti­cal. Some­thing for every­one here, in oth­er words. Go ahead and give it a try. No mat­ter if you can man­age ten min­utes or an hour a day, it’s nev­er too late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Allen Ginsberg Teaches You How to Meditate with a Rock Song Featuring Bob Dylan on Bass

in Music, Poetry, Politics, Religion | July 25th, 2016

dylan ginsberg meditation

Image via Elisa Dor­man, Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

What­ev­er oth­er cri­te­ria we use to lump them together—shared aims of psy­che­del­ic con­scious­ness-expand­ing through drugs and East­ern reli­gion, frank explo­rations of alter­na­tive sex­u­al­i­ties, anti-estab­lish­ment cred—the Beats were each in their own way true to the name in one very sim­ple way: they all col­lab­o­rat­ed with musi­cians, wrote song or poems as songs, and saw lit­er­a­ture as a pub­lic, per­for­ma­tive art form like music.

And though I sup­pose one could call some of their for­ays into record­ed music gim­micky at times, I can’t imag­ine Jack Kerouac’s career mak­ing a whole lot of sense with­out Bebop, or Bur­roughs’ with­out psy­che­del­ic rock and tape and noise exper­i­men­ta­tion, or Gins­berg’ with­out… well, Gins­berg got into a lit­tle bit of every­thing, didn’t he? Whether writ­ing calyp­sos about the CIA, per­form­ing and record­ing with The Clash, show­ing up on MTV with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney…. He nev­er worked with Kanye, but I imag­ine he prob­a­bly would have.

For each of these artists, the medi­um deliv­ered a mes­sage. Kerouac’s odes to jazz, lone­li­ness, and wan­der­lust; Bur­roughs’ dark, para­noid prophe­cies about gov­ern­ment con­trol; and Ginsberg’s anti-war jere­mi­ads and insis­tent pleas for peace, free­dom, tol­er­ance, and enlight­en­ment. Ever the trick­ster and teacher, Gins­berg often used humor to dis­arm his audi­ence, then went in for the kill, so to speak. We may find no more point­ed an exam­ple of this comedic ped­a­gogy than his 1981 song, “Do the Med­i­ta­tion Rock,” record­ed in 1982 as a sham­bling folk-rock jam below with gui­tarist Steven Tay­lor, and mem­bers of Bob Dylan’s tour­ing band—including Dylan him­self mak­ing a rare appear­ance on bass.

As the sto­ry goes, accord­ing to Hank Shteam­er at Rolling Stone, Gins­berg was in Los Ange­les and “eager to book some stu­dio time. Dylan oblig­ed, and agreed to foot the bill for the stu­dio costs on the con­di­tion that Gins­berg would pay the musi­cians. The two met at Dylan’s San­ta Mon­i­ca stu­dio and, as Tay­lor remem­bers it, jammed for 10 hours.” Many more record­ings from that ses­sion made it onto the recent­ly released The Last World on First Blues, which also includes con­tri­bu­tions from Jack Kerouac’s musi­cal part­ner David Amram, folk leg­end Hap­py Traum, and exper­i­men­tal cel­list, singer, and dis­co pro­duc­er Arthur Rus­sell.

See Gins­berg, Tay­lor, Rus­sell, and Ginsberg’s part­ner Peter Orlovsky (med­i­tat­ing), per­form the song above on a PBS spe­cial called “Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell,” cre­at­ed in 1984 by Kore­an video artist Naim June Paik. As Gins­berg explains it in the lin­er notes to his col­lec­tion Holy Soul, Jel­ly Roll, the song came togeth­er after his own med­i­ta­tion train­ing in the late sev­en­ties, when the poet got the okay from his Bud­dhist teacher Chogyam Trung­pa Rin­poche (founder of Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty) to “show basic med­i­ta­tion in his tra­di­tion­al class­rooms or groups at poet­ry readings”—his goal, he says, to “knock all the poets out with sug­ar-coat­ed dhar­ma.”

Christ­mas Eve, I stopped in the mid­dle of the block at a stoop and wrote the words down, note­book on my knee. I fig­ured that if any­one lis­tened to the words, they’d find com­plete instruc­tions for clas­si­cal sit­ting prac­tice, Samatha-Vipas­sana (“Qui­et­ing the mind and clear see­ing”). Some humor in the form, it does­n’t have to be tak­en over-seri­ous­ly, yet it’s pre­cise.

You may have noticed the famil­iar cadence of the cho­rus; it’s a take-off, he says, on “I Fought the Law,” record­ed in 1977 by his soon-to-be musi­cal part­ners, The Clash. In the live ver­sion below at New York’s Ukran­ian Nation­al Home, the song gets a more stripped-down, punk rock treat­ment with Tom Rogers on gui­tar. Like many a wan­der­ing bard, Gins­berg changes and adapts the lyrics slight­ly to the venue and occa­sion. See the Allen Gins­berg Project for sev­er­al pub­lished ver­sions of the lyrics and his changes in this ren­di­tion.

Apart from the basic med­i­ta­tion instruc­tions, which are easy to fol­low in writ­ing and song, Ginsberg’s “Do the Med­i­ta­tion Rock” had anoth­er mes­sage, spe­cif­ic to his under­stand­ing of the pow­er of med­i­ta­tion; it can change the world, in spite of “a holo­caust” or “Apoc­a­lypse in a long red car.” As Gins­berg speak/sings, “If you sit for an hour or a minute every day / you can tell the Super­pow­er, sit the same way / you can tell the Super­pow­er, watch and wait.” No mat­ter how bad things seem, he says, “it’s nev­er too late to stop and med­i­tate.” Hear anoth­er record­ed ver­sion of the song below from Holy Soul, Jel­ly Roll, record­ed live in Kansas City by William S. Bur­roughs in 1989.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

Allen Gins­berg & The Clash Per­form the Punk Poem “Cap­i­tal Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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R. Crumb Illustrates Genesis: A Faithful, Idiosyncratic Illustration of All 50 Chapters

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Religion | May 27th, 2016

It is wide­ly accept­ed among schol­ars that the first few books of the Bible—including, of course, Gen­e­sis, with its cre­ation myths and flood story—are a patch­work of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sources, pieced togeth­er by so-called redac­tors. This “doc­u­men­tary hypoth­e­sis” iden­ti­fies the lit­er­ary char­ac­ter­is­tics of each source, and attempts to recon­struct their dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­texts. Pri­mar­i­ly refined by Ger­man schol­ars in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the the­o­ry is very per­sua­sive, but can also seem pret­ty schemat­ic and dry, rob­bing the orig­i­nal texts of much of their live­li­ness, rhetor­i­cal pow­er, and ancient strange­ness.

Anoth­er Ger­man schol­ar, Her­mann Gunkel, approached Gen­e­sis a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. “Every­one knows”—write the edi­tors of a schol­ar­ly col­lec­tion on the foun­da­tion­al Bib­li­cal text—Gunkel’s “mot­to”: “Gen­e­sis ist eine Samm­lung von Sagen”—“Genesis is a col­lec­tion of pop­u­lar tales.” Rather than read­ing the var­i­ous sto­ries con­tained with­in as his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives or the­o­log­i­cal trea­tis­es, Gunkel saw them as redact­ed leg­ends, myths, and folk tales—as ancient lit­er­a­ture. “Leg­ends are not lies,” he writes in The Leg­ends of Gen­e­sis, “on the con­trary, they are a par­tic­u­lar form of poet­ry.”

Such was the approach of car­toon­ist and illus­tra­tor Robert Crumb, who took on illus­trat­ing the entire book of Gen­e­sis, “a text so great and so strange,” he says, “that it lends itself read­i­ly to graph­ic depic­tions.” In the short video above, Crumb describes the cre­ation nar­ra­tive in the ancient Hebrew book as “an arche­typ­al sto­ry of our cul­ture, such a strong sto­ry with all kinds of metaphor­i­cal mean­ing.” He also talks about his gen­uine respect and admi­ra­tion for the sto­ries of Gen­e­sis and their ori­gins. “You study ancient Mesopotami­an writ­ings,” says Crumb, “and there’s all of these ref­er­ences in the old­est Sumer­ian leg­ends about the tree of knowl­edge” and oth­er ele­ments that appear in Gen­e­sis, mixed up and redact­ed: “That’s how folk leg­ends and all that shit evolve over cen­turies.”

The Bib­li­cal book first struck Crumb as “some­thing to sat­i­rize,” and his ini­tial approach leans on the irrev­er­ent, scat­o­log­i­cal tropes we know so well in his work. But he instead decid­ed to pro­duce a faith­ful visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the text just as it is, illus­trat­ing each chap­ter, all 50, word for word. The result, writes Col­in Smith at Sequart, is “idio­syn­crat­ic, ten­der-heart­ed and ulti­mate­ly inspir­ing.” It is also a crit­i­cal visu­al com­men­tary on the text’s cen­tral char­ac­ter: Crumb’s God “is reg­u­lar­ly, if not exclu­sive­ly, por­trayed as an unam­bigu­ous­ly self-obsessed and blood­thirsty despot, ter­ri­fy­ing in his demands, ter­ri­fy­ing in his bru­tal­i­ty.” Arguably, these traits emerge from the sto­ries unaid­ed, yet when we’re told, for exam­ple, that “The Lord regret­ted hav­ing made man on Earth and it griev­ed him in his heart,” Crumb “shows us noth­ing of regret and grief, but rather a furi­ous old dic­ta­tor appar­ent­ly tot­ter­ing on the edge of mad­ness.”

“It’s not the evil of men that Crumb’s con­cerned with,” writes Smith, “so much as the psy­chol­o­gy of a crea­ture who’d slaugh­ter an entire world.” In that inter­pre­ta­tion, he echoes crit­ics of the Bible’s the­ol­o­gy since the Enlight­en­ment, from Voltaire to Christo­pher Hitchens. But he doesn’t shy away from graph­ic depic­tions of human bru­tal­i­ty, either. Crumb’s move away from satire and deci­sion to “do it straight,” as he told NPR, came from his sense that the sweep­ing, vio­lent mythol­o­gy and “soap opera” rela­tion­ships already lend them­selves “to lurid illustration”—his forté. Orig­i­nal­ly intend­ing to do just the first cou­ple chap­ters “as a com­ic sto­ry,” he soon found he had a mar­ket for all 50 and “stu­pid­ly said, ‘okay, I’ll do it.’” The work—undertaken over four years—proved so exhaust­ing, he says he “earned every pen­ny.”

Does Crumb him­self iden­ti­fy with the reli­gious tra­di­tions in Gen­e­sis? Raised a Catholic, he left the church at 16: “I have my own lit­tle spir­i­tu­al quest,” Crumb says, “but I don’t asso­ciate it with any par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. I think that the tra­di­tion­al West­ern reli­gions all are very prob­lem­at­ic in my view.” That said, like many non­re­li­gious peo­ple who read and respect reli­gious texts, he knows the Bible well—better, it turned out, than his edi­tor, a self-described expert. “I just illus­trate it as it’s writ­ten,” said Crumb, “and the con­tra­dic­tions stand.”

When I first illus­trat­ed that part, the cre­ation, where there’s basi­cal­ly two dif­fer­ent cre­ation sto­ries that do con­tra­dict each oth­er, and I sent it to the edi­tor at Nor­ton, the pub­lish­er, who told me he was a Bible schol­ar. And he read it, and he said wait a minute, this does­n’t make sense. This con­tra­dicts itself. Can we rewrite this so it makes sense? And I said that’s the way it’s writ­ten. He said, that’s the way it’s writ­ten? I said, yeah, you’re a Bible schol­ar. Check it out. 

Crumb invites us all to “check it out”—this col­lec­tion of arche­typ­al leg­ends that inform so much of our pol­i­tics and cul­ture, whether the bizarre and cost­ly cre­ation of a fun­da­men­tal­ist “Ark Park” (“dinosaurs and all”), or the Bib­li­cal epics of Cecil B. DeMille or Dar­ren Aronof­sky, or the poet­ry of John Mil­ton, or the inter­pre­tive illus­tra­tions of William Blake. Whether we think of it as his­to­ry or myth or some patch­work quilt of both, we should read Gen­e­sis. R. Crum­b’s illus­trat­ed ver­sion is as good—or better—a way to do so as any oth­er. See more of his illus­tra­tions at The Guardian and pur­chase his illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, Accord­ing to the Irrev­er­ent Com­ic Satirist Robert Crumb

R. Crumb’s Vibrant, Over-the-Top Album Cov­ers (1968–2004)

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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170 Renowned Academics Talk About Why They Disbelieve, or Believe, in God

in Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science | May 11th, 2016

Whether we choose to affil­i­ate with any sort of athe­ist move­ment or not, many peo­ple raised in the­is­tic reli­gions came over time to see God as a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter in ancient mytholo­gies and his­tor­i­cal fic­tions, as a place­hold­er for human igno­rance, or as a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of humanity’s great­est fears and desires. The notion that such a per­son­al super-being actu­al­ly exists has become for many of us, in William James’ terms, a “dead hypoth­e­sis.” As physi­cist Lawrence Krauss puts it in the video above, “there’s absolute­ly no evi­dence that we need the super­nat­ur­al hand of God” to explain the uni­verse. Reli­gions give us fan­ci­ful sto­ries, illus­trate eth­i­cal (and uneth­i­cal) prin­ci­ples, and enforce trib­al loy­al­ties, but they do not describe real­i­ty as it is.

We all come to hold our beliefs, or lack there­of, about reli­gious claims for an irre­ducibly com­plex vari­ety of rea­sons that are intel­lec­tu­al as well as moral, polit­i­cal, and emo­tion­al. Can we demon­strate, how­ev­er, that “the more sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate, intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est and objec­tive­ly scep­ti­cal a per­son is, the more like­ly they are to dis­be­lieve in any­thing super­nat­ur­al, includ­ing god”? Such is the the­sis of Dr. Jonathan Pararajasignham’s doc­u­men­tary 50 Renowned Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God, which con­sists of edit­ed clips from inter­views with “elite aca­d­e­mics and pro­fes­sors at top insti­tu­tions, many of whom are also Nobel Lau­re­ates.” The claim appears on the screen in each of the three videos above and below, fram­ing the inter­view clips as mount­ing evi­dence for the con­vinc­ing case that dis­be­lief is strong­ly cor­re­lat­ed with, if not nec­es­sar­i­ly caused by, sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy, intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty, and skep­ti­cism.

Since his first video, Parara­jas­ing­ham has expand­ed his series to include 100 more “Renowned Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God.” (See Parts Two and Three of the series above.) On the videos’ Youtube pages, he antic­i­pates a ready objec­tion, writ­ing, “I do not claim that this video demon­strates there is no God. It is not an argu­ment against God in itself, so there is no argu­ment from pop­u­lar­i­ty and author­i­ty.” If you’ve already arrived at the con­clu­sion, you’ll find it con­firmed many times over by a cast that includes physi­cists like Krauss, Richard Feyn­man, and Steven Wein­berg, philoso­phers like A.C. Gray­ing, Bertrand Rus­sell, and John Sear­le, and far too many more illus­tri­ous thinkers to name. (See a com­plete list on the Youtube pages of each video.) In addi­tion to well-known athe­ist writ­ers like Daniel Den­nett, the series also fea­tures aca­d­e­mics like anthro­pol­o­gist Pas­cal Boy­er, whose book Reli­gion Explained makes a nov­el and very per­sua­sive nat­u­ral­is­tic argu­ment for why humans have believed in the super­nat­ur­al for thou­sands of years.

Believ­ers may counter with their own list of smart peo­ple who do believe in God, and who also work in the hard sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy, includ­ing renowned fig­ures like Human Genome Project direc­tor Fran­cis Collins and physi­cist Free­man Dyson. Whether or not they’d wish to claim failed pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ben Car­son or reli­gious apol­o­gists Dinesh D’Souza and Ravi Zacharias as exam­ples of “intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty and sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy” I couldn’t say, but all of those peo­ple and more are includ­ed in the video above, 20 Chris­t­ian Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God, which Parara­jas­ing­ham pro­duced as a coun­ter­point to his 50 Aca­d­e­mics series. Find the com­plete list of names for this video, along with links to com­plete inter­views, on Youtube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es

Robert Sapol­sky Explains the Bio­log­i­cal Basis of Reli­gios­i­ty, and What It Shares in Com­mon with OCD, Schiz­o­phre­nia & Epilep­sy

Richard Feyn­man on Reli­gion, Sci­ence, the Search for Truth & Our Will­ing­ness to Live with Doubt

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why He’s Uncom­fort­able Being Labeled an ‘Athe­ist’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Religious Songs That Secular People Can Love: Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Sam Cooke, Johnny Cash & Your Favorites

in Music, Religion | December 15th, 2015

There are good rea­sons to find the onslaught of reli­gious music this time of year objec­tion­able. And yet—though I want to do my part in the War on Christmas—I don’t so much object to the con­tent of Christ­mas songs. It’s the music! It’s hack­neyed and tired and gross­ly over­played and a lot of it was nev­er very good to begin with. I’d make the same dis­tinc­tion with any kind of music, reli­gious or oth­er­wise. I grew up in church­es full of Chris­t­ian music, and a lot of it was just ter­ri­ble: the worst of kind of soft rock or adult con­tem­po­rary paired with lyrics so insipid they would make the gospel writers—whoever they were—cringe. Updates with the slick pro­duc­tion of alt-rock, hip-hop, or pop-coun­try styles have only made things worse. On the oth­er hand, some of the most pow­er­ful and mov­ing music I’ve ever heard comes from the church, whether Han­del, The Sta­ples Singers, the Lou­vin Broth­ers, or so many oth­er clas­si­cal and gospel artists and com­posers.

Any­one with a deep affec­tion for West­ern clas­si­cal music prob­a­bly has their share of favorite Chris­t­ian music, what­ev­er their per­son­al beliefs. So, too, do fans of Amer­i­can folk, blues, and coun­try. Some artists have cov­ered the odd reli­gious tune as part of a broad roots reper­toire, like the Byrds’ cov­er of Blue­grass gospel leg­ends the Lou­vin Broth­ers’ corn­ball “The Chris­t­ian Life,” above, from 1968’s Sweet­heart of the Rodeo. Though Gram Par­sons, with the band for the record­ing of this album, had his tra­di­tion­al lean­ings, his musi­cal reli­gion was more “Cos­mic Amer­i­can” than Chris­t­ian. But before Par­sons joined the band and turned ‘em full coun­try rock for a time, the Byrds record­ed anoth­er reli­gious song, one of their biggest hits—Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” (below), which cribs all of its lyrics ver­ba­tim from Chap­ter 3 of the Book of Eccle­si­astes (eas­i­ly the non-reli­gious person’s favorite book of the Bible).

Oth­er Amer­i­can leg­ends have turned to faith in dra­mat­ic con­ver­sions and have writ­ten earnest, orig­i­nal reli­gious music. Most famous­ly, we have the case of Bob Dylan, whose con­ver­sion to evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty saw him pros­e­ly­tiz­ing from the stage. He also wrote some beau­ti­ful songs like “Pre­cious Angel,” at the top of the post, which he claimed was for the woman who brought him to Chris­tian­i­ty (and which sup­pos­ed­ly con­tains a dig at his ex-wife Sara for not con­vert­ing him). Though it fea­tures some of the more dis­turb­ing lyri­cal turns Dylan has tak­en in his career, it’s one of my favorite tunes of his from this strange peri­od, not least because of the bril­liant gui­tar work of Mark Knopfler.

What­ev­er beliefs he’s claimed over the decades, Dylan’s music has always been reli­gious in some sense, part­ly because of the Amer­i­can folk tra­di­tions he draws on. Almost all of the ear­ly R&B and rock and roll artists came from the folk gospel world, from Elvis to Lit­tle Richard to Jer­ry Lee Lewis. Notably, the gold­en-voiced Sam Cooke got his start as a gospel singer with sev­er­al vocal groups, includ­ing his own The Soul Stir­rers. The har­monies in their ren­di­tion of gospel clas­sic “Far­ther Along” (above) give me chills every time I hear it, even though I don’t cred­it the song’s beliefs.

It’s a com­mon feel­ing I get with Amer­i­can soul, blues, and coun­try singers who moved in and out of the pop­u­lar and gospel worlds. Then there are those artists who left gospel for out­law star­dom, then returned to the fold and embraced their church roots lat­er in life. A prime exam­ple of this kind of spir­i­tu­al, and musi­cal, renew­al is that of John­ny Cash. There are many sides of gospel Cash. Per­haps the most poignant of his reli­gious record­ings come from his final years. Though it suf­fers from some com­mer­cial overuse, Cash’s record­ing of blues clas­sic “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (often titled “Run On”), above, is equal parts men­ac­ing and haunt­ing, a Chris­t­ian-themed memen­to mori that caught on big with lots of sec­u­lar music fans.

The list of reli­gious music that non-reli­gious peo­ple love could go on and on. Though the exam­ples here are explic­it­ly Chris­t­ian, they cer­tain­ly don’t have to be. There’s Yusef Islam, for­mer­ly Cat Stevens, who came back to record stir­ring orig­i­nal music after his con­ver­sion to Islam, and whose pow­er­ful “Morn­ing has Bro­ken” moves believ­ers and non-believ­ers alike. There’s Bob Mar­ley, or any num­ber of pop­u­lar Rasta­far­i­an reg­gae artists. Then there are more con­tem­po­rary artists mak­ing reli­gious music for large­ly sec­u­lar audi­ences. One could ref­er­ence indie dar­ling Suf­jan Stevens, whose reli­gious beliefs are cen­tral to his song­writ­ing. And there’s a favorite of mine, Mark Lane­gan, for­mer Scream­ing Trees singer and cur­rent rock and roll jour­ney­man who often works with reli­gious themes and imagery, most notably in the glo­ri­ous “Revival,” above, with the Soul­savers project.

The love many non-reli­gious peo­ple have for some reli­gious music often comes from a reli­gious upbring­ing, some­thing singer/songwriter Iris Dement dis­cussed in a recent inter­view on NPR’s Fresh Air. Dement has record­ed one of the most mov­ing ren­di­tions of a hymn I remem­ber fond­ly from child­hood church days: a pow­er­ful­ly spare ver­sion of “Lean­ing on the Ever­last­ing Arms” from the 2010 True Grit sound­track. She’s also writ­ten what may be one of the best reli­gious songs for sec­u­lar (or non-reli­gious, or post-reli­gious, what­ev­er…) peo­ple. In “Let the Mys­tery Be,” above, Demen­t’s agnos­tic refrain express­es a very sen­si­ble atti­tude, in my view: “But no one knows for cer­tain and so it’s all the same to me / I think I’ll just let the mys­tery be.”

These are but a few of the reli­gious songs that move this most­ly sec­u­lar per­son. Whether you’re reli­gious or not, what are some of your favorite reli­gious songs that have broad crossover appeal? Feel free to name your favorites in the com­ments below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

Gui­tar Sto­ries: Mark Knopfler on the Six Gui­tars That Shaped His Career

Athe­ist Ira Glass Believes Chris­tians Get the Short End of the Media Stick

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Björk, Age 11, Read a Christmas Nativity Story on a 1976 Icelandic TV Special

in Education, Life, Music, Religion, Television | December 4th, 2015

The hol­i­days can be hard, start­ing in Octo­ber when the red and green dec­o­ra­tions begin muscling in on the Hal­loween aisle.

Most Won­der­ful Time of the Year, you say? Oh, go stuff a stock­ing in it, Andy Williams!

The major­i­ty of us have more in com­mon with the Grinch, Scrooge, and/or the Lit­tle Match Girl.

Still, it’s hard to resist the preter­nat­u­ral­ly mature 11-year-old Björk read­ing the nativ­i­ty sto­ry in her native Ice­landic, backed by unsmil­ing old­er kids from the Children’s Music School in Reyk­javík.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly since I myself do not speak Ice­landic.

The fact that it’s in black and white is mere­ly the blue­ber­ries on the spiced cab­bage.

It speaks high­ly of the Ice­landic approach to edu­ca­tion that a prin­ci­pal’s office reg­u­lar who report­ed­ly chafed at her school’s “retro, con­stant Beethoven and Bach bol­locks” cur­ricu­lum was award­ed the plum part in this 1976 Christ­mas spe­cial for the Nation­al Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice.

It would also appear that lit­tle Björk, the fierce­ly self-reliant latchkey kid of a Bohemi­an sin­gle moth­er, was far and away the most charis­mat­ic kid enrolled in the Bar­namúsik­skóli.

(Less than a year lat­er her self-titled first album sold 7000 copies in Iceland—a mod­est amount com­pared to Adele’s debut, maybe, but c’mon, the kid was 11! And Ice­land’s pop­u­la­tion at the time was a cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand and change.)

As to the above per­for­mance’s reli­gious slant, it wasn’t a reflec­tion of her per­son­al beliefs. As she told the UK music webzine Drowned in Sound in 2011:

…nature is my reli­gion, in a way… I think every­body has their own pri­vate reli­gion. I guess what both­ers me is when mil­lions have the same one. It just can’t be true. It’s just…what?

Still, it prob­a­bly was­n’t too con­tro­ver­sial that the pro­gram­mers elect­ed to cleave to the rea­son in the sea­son. Ice­landic church atten­dance may be low-key, but the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of its cit­i­zens iden­ti­fy as Luther­an, or some oth­er Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion.

(They also believe in elves and 13 for­mer­ly fear­some Yule Lads, descen­dants of the ogres Grýla and Lep­palúði. By the time Björk appeared on earth, they had long since evolved, through a com­bi­na­tion of for­eign influ­ence and pub­lic decree, into the kinder, gen­tler, not quite San­ta-esque ver­sion, address­ing the stu­dio audi­ence at the top of the act.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Album Björk Record­ed as an 11-Year-Old: Fea­tures Cov­er Art Pro­vid­ed By Her Mom (1977)

A Young Björk Decon­structs (Phys­i­cal­ly & The­o­ret­i­cal­ly) a Tele­vi­sion in a Delight­ful Retro Video

Björk Presents Ground­break­ing Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cians on the BBC’s Mod­ern Min­i­mal­ists (1997)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She is proud to orig­i­nat­ed the role of Santa’s mor­tal con­sort, Mary, in her Jew­ish hus­band Greg Kotis’ Nordic-themed hol­i­day fan­ta­sia, The Truth About San­ta. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Albert Einstein On God: “Nothing More Than the Expression and Product of Human Weakness”

in Physics, Religion | November 27th, 2015

Einstein Gutkind Letter

With depend­able fre­quen­cy, the reli­gious views of Albert Ein­stein get revised and re-revised accord­ing to some re-dis­cov­ered or re-inter­pret­ed quo­ta­tion from his sci­en­tif­ic work or per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence. It’s not espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing that Ein­stein had a few things to say on the sub­ject. As the pre-emi­nent the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist of his age, he spent his days pon­der­ing the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse. As one of the most famous pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als in his­to­ry, and an immi­grant to a coun­try as high­ly reli­gious as the Unit­ed States, Ein­stein was often called on to voice his reli­gious opin­ions. Like any one of us over the course of a life­time, those state­ments do not har­mo­nize into a neat and tidy con­fes­sion of belief, or unbe­lief. Instead, at times, Ein­stein explic­it­ly aligns him­self with the pan­the­ism of Baruch Spin­oza; at oth­er times, he express­es a much more skep­ti­cal atti­tude. Often he seems to stand in awe of a vague deist notion of God; Often, he seems max­i­mal­ly agnos­tic.

Ein­stein reject­ed the athe­ist label, it’s true. At no point in his adult life, how­ev­er, did he express any­thing at all like a belief in tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. On the con­trary, he made a par­tic­u­lar point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from the the­olo­gies of Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty espe­cial­ly. Though he did admit to a brief peri­od of “deep reli­gious­ness” as a child, this phase, he wrote “reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.” As he writes in his Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Notes, after a “fanat­ic orgy of free­think­ing,” brought on by his expo­sure to sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, he devel­oped a “mis­trust of every kind of author­i­ty… a skep­ti­cal atti­tude toward the con­vic­tions that were alive in any spe­cif­ic social environment—an atti­tude that has nev­er left me, even though, lat­er on, it has been tem­pered by a bet­ter insight into the causal con­nec­tions.” In con­trast to the “reli­gious par­adise” of his youth, Ein­stein wrote that he had come to find anoth­er kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yon­der… which stands before us like a great rid­dle.”

Einstein’s rejec­tion of a per­son­al God was unde­ni­ably final, such that in 1954, a year before his death, he would write the let­ter above to philoso­pher Erik Gutkind after read­ing Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Bib­li­cal Call to Revolt on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a mutu­al friend. The book, Ein­stein tells its author, is “writ­ten in a lan­guage inac­ces­si­ble to me.” He goes on to dis­par­age all reli­gion as “the most child­ish super­sti­tion”:

The word God is for me noth­ing more than the expres­sion and prod­uct of human weak­ness, the Bible a col­lec­tion of hon­or­able, but still pure­ly prim­i­tive, leg­ends which are nev­er­the­less pret­ty child­ish. No inter­pre­ta­tion, no mat­ter how sub­tle, can change this for me. For me the Jew­ish reli­gion like all oth­er reli­gions is an incar­na­tion of the most child­ish super­sti­tion. And the Jew­ish peo­ple to whom I glad­ly belong, and whose think­ing I have a deep affin­i­ty for, have no dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty for me than all oth­er peo­ple. As far as my expe­ri­ence goes, they are also no bet­ter than oth­er human groups, although they are pro­tect­ed from the worst can­cers by a lack of pow­er…

You can read a full tran­script at Let­ters of Note, who include the let­ter in their sec­ond vol­ume of fas­ci­nat­ing cor­re­spon­dence from famous fig­ures, More Let­ters of Note. The let­ter went up for auc­tion in May of 2008, and a much more dog­mat­i­cal­ly anti-reli­gious sci­en­tist had a keen inter­est in acquir­ing it: “Unsur­pris­ing­ly,” Let­ters of Note point out, “one of the unsuc­cess­ful bid­ders was Richard Dawkins.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Do Sci­en­tists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Ein­stein in 1936. Ein­stein Then Responds

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Ein­stein for the Mass­es: Yale Presents a Primer on the Great Physicist’s Think­ing

Albert Einstein​ & Sig­mund Freud​ Exchange Let­ters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

Free Online Physics Cours­es

50 Famous Aca­d­e­mics & Sci­en­tists Talk About God

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free Speech Bites: Nigel Warburton, Host of Philosophy Bites, Creates a Spin Off Podcast Dedicated to Freedom of Expression

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Politics, Religion | November 25th, 2015

free speech bites

In osten­si­bly lib­er­al democ­ra­cies in the West, atti­tudes towards free speech vary wide­ly giv­en dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal con­texts, and can shift dra­mat­i­cal­ly over time. We’re liv­ing in the midst of a gen­er­a­tional shift on the issue in the U.S.; a recent Pew sur­vey found that 40 per­cent of millennials—18–34 year olds—favor gov­ern­ment bans on offen­sive speech. The usu­al caveats apply when read­ing this data; New York magazine’s Sci­ence of Us blog breaks down the demo­graph­ics and points out prob­lems with def­i­n­i­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly with that of the word “offen­sive.” They write, “plen­ty of folks freak out about anti-cop sen­ti­ments but are fine with racial­ly loaded language—or insert your own exam­ples.” As com­men­ta­tors note almost dai­ly, var­i­ous free speech advo­cates show all man­ner of par­tial­i­ty when it comes to whose speech they choose to defend and whose they, unwit­ting­ly per­haps, sup­press.

Euro­pean coun­tries, of course, already have all sorts of laws that curb offen­sive speech and impose harsh penal­ties, from large fines to jail time. Those laws are extend­ing to the inter­net as well, a speech domain long cen­sored by Chi­nese author­i­ties.

Whether Euro­pean mea­sures against racist and xeno­pho­bic speech actu­al­ly lessen racism and xeno­pho­bia is an open ques­tion, as is the prob­lem of excep­tions to the laws that seem to allow cer­tain kinds of prej­u­dices as they strong­ly cen­sor oth­ers. Much more extreme exam­ples of the sup­pres­sion of free speech have recent­ly come to light under auto­crat­ic regimes in the Mid­dle East. In Syr­ia, soft­ware devel­op­er and free speech advo­cate Bas­sel Kharta­bil has been held in prison since 2012 for his activism. In Sau­di Ara­bia, artist, poet, and Pales­tin­ian refugee Ashraf Fayadh has been sen­tenced to death for “renounc­ing Islam.”

We could add to all of these exam­ples hun­dreds of oth­ers, from all over the world, but in addi­tion to the sta­tis­tics and the dis­turb­ing indi­vid­ual cas­es, it is worth ask­ing broad­er, more philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about free speech as we draw our own con­clu­sions about the issues. What exact­ly do we mean by “free speech”? Should all speech be pro­tect­ed, even that meant to libel indi­vid­u­als or whole groups or to delib­er­ate­ly incite vio­lence? Should we tol­er­ate a pub­lic dis­course made up of lies, mis­in­for­ma­tion, prej­u­di­cial invec­tive, and per­son­al attacks? Should cit­i­zens and the press have the right to ques­tion offi­cial gov­ern­ment nar­ra­tives and to demand trans­paren­cy?

To help us think through these polit­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly fraught dis­cus­sions, we could lis­ten to Free Speech Bites, a pod­cast spon­sored by the Index on Cen­sor­ship and host­ed by free­lance philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton, who also hosts the pop­u­lar pod­cast Phi­los­o­phy Bites. The for­mat is iden­ti­cal to that long-stand­ing show, but instead of short con­ver­sa­tions with philoso­phers, War­bur­ton has brief, live­ly dis­cus­sions with free speech advo­cates, includ­ing authors, artists, politi­cians, jour­nal­ists, come­di­ans, car­toon­ists, and aca­d­e­mics. In the episode above, War­bur­ton talks with DJ Tay­lor, biog­ra­ph­er of the man con­sid­ered almost a saint of free speech, George Orwell.

Of his sub­ject, Tay­lor remarks, “I think it’s true to say that most of Orwell’s pro­fes­sion­al life, large amounts of the things that he wrote, are to do with the sup­pres­sion of the indi­vid­ual voice.” At the same time, he points out that Orwell’s “view of free speech is by no means clear cut.” The “whole free speech issue became much more del­i­cate­ly shad­ed than it would oth­er­wise have been” dur­ing the extra­or­di­nary times of the Span­ish Civ­il War and World War II. Tay­lor refers to the “clas­sic lib­er­al dilem­ma: how far do we tol­er­ate some­thing that, if tol­er­at­ed, will cease to tol­er­ate us…. If you are liv­ing in a democ­ra­cy and somebody’s putting out fas­cist pam­phlets encour­ag­ing the end of that democ­ra­cy, how much rope do you give them?”

In anoth­er episode, Irshad Manji—feminist, self-described “Mus­lim refusenik,” and author of The Trou­ble with Islam Today—talks free speech and reli­gion, and offers a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than what we’re used to hear­ing report­ed from Islam­ic thinkers. When War­bur­ton says that Islam and free expres­sion sound “like two incom­pat­i­ble things,” Man­ji coun­ters that as a “per­son of faith” she believes “free expres­sion is as much a reli­gious oblig­a­tion as it is a human right.” In her esti­ma­tion, “no human being can legit­i­mate­ly behave as if he or she owns a monop­oly on truth.” Any­thing less than a soci­ety that tol­er­ates civ­il dis­agree­ment, she says, means that “we’re play­ing God with one anoth­er.” In her reli­gious per­spec­tive, “devot­ing your­self to one god means that you must defend human lib­er­ty.” Man­ji sounds much more like Enlight­en­ment Chris­t­ian reform­ers like John Locke than she does many inter­preters of Islam, and she is well aware of the unpop­u­lar­i­ty of her point of view in much of the Islam­ic world.

Address­ing the ques­tion of why free speech mat­ters, broad­cast­er and writer Jonathan Dimbleby—former chair of the Index on Censorship—inaugurated the pod­cast in 2012 with a more clas­si­cal­ly philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion of John Stu­art Mill’s On Lib­er­ty and the lib­er­al argu­ment against cen­sor­ship Mill and oth­ers artic­u­lat­ed. For Dim­ble­by, “free­dom of expres­sion [is] not only a right but a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of what it means to be a civ­i­lized indi­vid­ual.” It’s a view he holds “very strong­ly,” but he admits that the valid excep­tions to the rule are “where the dif­fi­cult ter­ri­to­ry starts.” Dim­ble­by points to “very obvi­ous cir­cum­stances when you don’t have free­dom of expres­sion and should not have free­dom of expres­sion.” One of the excep­tions involves “laws that say that if you express your­self freely, you are direct­ly putting some­one else’s life at risk.” This is not as clear-cut as it seems. The “dan­ger­ous ter­ri­to­ry,” he argues, begins with cir­cum­scrib­ing lan­guage that incites anger or offense in oth­ers. We are back to the ques­tion of offense, and it is not a uncom­pli­cat­ed one. Although activists very often need to be unciv­il to be heard at all, there’s also a nec­es­sary place for pub­lic dis­cus­sions that are as thought­ful and care­ful as we can man­age. And for that rea­son, I’m grate­ful for the inter­ven­tion of Free Speech Bites and the inter­na­tion­al vari­ety of views it rep­re­sents.

For more of those views, see the Index on Censorship’s web­site to stream or down­load sev­en more Free Speech Bites pod­casts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Great Writ­ers on Free Speech and the Envi­ron­ment

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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